A NUT FOR PSYCHOLOGISTS

By PEARL LENORE CURRAN

[channel for Patience Worth]

From: The Unpartizan Review, March-April 1920, pp.
357-72.

Let any man announce himself a psychic if he would feel the
firm ground of his respectability slip from beneath his feet. He
may have attained through rigorous living an enviable reputation,
but if he once admits himself an instrument differing in any
manner from the masses, he will find himself a suspected
character. Science with side glances will talk secretly of dire
and devious matters, connecting with his name such doubtful
associates as dis-associations, obsessions, secret deviltries of
all manner and kind. They humor the subject and listen tolerantly
to his effort to prove himself sane, while they cast wise eyes and
smile.

He will find that the mere act of honestly trying to give the
world the truth, has opened the door of his soul to ridicule and
abuse. It is my honest belief that the humiliation the world has
offered to the psychic has kept many splendid examples of God's
mysteries hidden and that there are many true and wonderful
phenomena that are not disclosed or announced, for this reason
only.

Because one produces a superusual phenomenon, is he to be
immediately classified as a monstrosity, and mentally and
physically placed upon the dissecting table? Is there no gentle
means by which we may have the confidence of the "subject" and get
the full result from him, without cramping him or putting him upon
the defensive?

In my own case, at my first encounter with science I developed
a sensitiveness which caused, on both sides, a deep distrust, and
it has only been through frequent meeting with broad men of that
cloth that I have at last become enough interested in their
attitude to try to present whatever I may have that may interest
them.

A long conversation with Dr. James Hyslop with whom I had had a
misunderstanding, brought this thing clearly to me, and I realized
that such men as he and Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan Doyle, with
an ever widening circle of others, were pursuing their
investigations in the manner I have suggested, with the confidence
of the subject retained. This has stimulated me with the desire to
aid them with all my power.

When I let my modest name be coupled with that of, Puritan
spinster of some hundreds of years ago, I never for one instant
realized that Patience Worth and I would be cast out upon the
stormy sea of distrust. There is no come-back for the psychic.
Being suspected, his word is worth less than his goods. Science
labors to disprove them without even looking at them. So in
presenting certain interesting facts regarding my own "case" I do
it with no desire to offer proof or to try to convince anyone of
anything whatever, but merely to jot down some of the incidents
which might be interesting to interested.

During the six years I have written for Patience Worth I have
had as witnesses, with me at the board, thousands of people. I
have never attempted any preparation either for the meetings or,
when writing, for any of the results; all have been impromptu. My
own opinions even after all this long experience, are worth
nothing to the most ordinary scientist. I am giving these facts
that he may classify or not a's he pleases.

My physical being might be considered an important factor. I
was never ill in all my life from any disease other than a cold or
some minor complaint, and never spent a continuous week in bed. I
never have been robust, have weighed from 110 to 120 pounds, and
am five feet six inches high. I sleep normally, have no queer
obsession or wakefulness, or urge to write; have no queer
appetites, either mentally or physically. I do my own housework
with the aid of one maid, and cook for six people most of the
time. Patience Worth never obsesses me and I feel as normally
about her as I do about any other friend who has gone into the
great beyond.

Whatever may be the association which I describe as the
presence of Patience Worth, it is one of the most beautiful that
it can be the privilege of a human being experience. Through this
contact I have been educated to a deeper spiritual understanding
and appreciation than I might have acquired in any study I can
conceive of. Six years ago I could not have understood the
literare of Patience Worth, had it been shown to me. And I doubt
if it would have attracted me sufficiently to give me the desire
to study it.

The pictorial visions which accompany the coming of the words
have acted as a sort of primer, and gradually developed within me
a height of appreciation by persistently tempting my curiosity
with representations of incidents and symbols. I am like a child
with a magic picture book. Once I look upon it, all I have to do
is to watch its pages open before me, and revel in their beauty
and variety and novelty.

Probably this is the most persistent phase of the phenomena,
this series of panoramic and symbolic pictures which never fail to
show with each expression of Patience where there is any
possibility of giving an ocular illustration an expression.

When the poems come, there also appear before my eyes images of
each successive symbol, as the words are given me. If the stars
are mentioned, I see them in the sky. If heights or deeps or wide
spaces are mentioned, I get positively frightening sweeps of
space. So it is with smaller things of Nature, the fields, the
flowers and trees, with the field animals, whether they are
mentioned in the poem or not.

When the stories come, the scenes become panoramic, with the
characters moving and acting their parts, even speaking in
converse. The picture is not confined to the point narrated, but
takes in everything else within the circle of vision at the time.
For instance, if two people are seen talking on the street, I see
not only them, but the neighboring part of the street, with the
buildings, stones, dogs, people and all, just as they would be in
a real scene. (Or are these scenes actual reproductions?) If the
people talk a foreign language, as in The Sorry Tale, I
hear the talk, but over and above is the voice of Patience, either
interpreting or giving me the part she wishes to use as story.

What a wonderful privilege this is can only be imagined by one
who cannot see the actuality. Since this was found out by my
associates, we have been spending much time after writing on a
story, in my describing the scenes which accompanied it but did
not appear in it. While we were writing The Sorry Tale,
many a queer scene was, described; the dogs in the streets,
certain odd carts with wheels made of crossed reeds and cut in a
circle, the peculiar harness of the oxen, the quarrelling of the
long-bearded market men, and the wailing of the women as they
bartered for edibles, the dress of the priests, the holy of
holies, and the ark as it was at that time, restored, the scenes
at Bethlehem and Nazareth in which the Savior walked among men.
This was also true of England during the transcription of Hope
Trueblood, though the scenes were more familiar and therefore
of less interest, but just: as vivid.

One of the most wonderful symbols created to illustrate a poem
came during September, 1918. On this particular evening I had a
feeling of uplift, a sort of ecstasy which in some degree always
accompanies the coming of the greater poems, and I had unusual
mental flashes of white, radiant white, with a feeling of infinite
distances. I mentioned it to the family. It was our evening to
write, and when we sat with Patience, she showed this scene with
startling definiteness, preliminary to a wonderful poem which we
named: "The White River."

First was shown a vast sky with a limitless sense of stupendous
distance and grandeur, flanked by clouds of iridescent white
purity, through and on the edges of which quivered an electric
radiance. Thunder rolled majestically along the vasts, and tongues
of lightning played through the clouds, while above their edges,
quivering threads of electricity danced against the deep blue in
myriad flashes of silver and gold. But through all and over all
was this indescribable white purity, purer than dew, whiter than
young lilies, not dazzling, but soothing like a smile. Through the
foreground and stretching beyond to infinite distances, flowed a
river of forms all in white, coming, coming ever on between the
cloud-banks -- hosts following hosts with their faces eager and an
urge of gladness in their movements, their eyes lighted with a
wondrous light, and each glance fixed upon their leader who walked
before them with outstretched arms, Jesus of Nazareth. At this
point the poem came.

Sometimes Patience shows me pictures without ever saying
anything about them. Once she showed me a beautiful yellow bird
sitting in a hedge, a bird I had never seen, although I love birds
and know nearly all I have seen in this country. This was a rather
large bird, about seven inches from beak to tail. Patience finally
said:

"He who knoweth the hedgerows knoweth the yellowhammer."

I protested that it was not the yellowhammer I knew, but she
passed the subject without farther comment. Later we got out an
old encyclopedia and found a picture this bird, the English
yellowhammer. No one in the house knew anything about this
bird.

I have received several premonitory flashes of pictures, which
I have come to recognize as the beginning of a new story. As
usual, I told the members of the family when I received in June,
1918, a flash picture of what I sensed was a squalid charity place
of a very mean sort; a large and very grimy room, a rude basket
containing a newborn babe, and standing over it, making ribald
remarks, two low class women. About a week after this I had a
feeling while I was writing that the story was about to start, but
it passed off without result. Then within a few days it happened.
I have before me the record prepared at the time by Mr. Curran
from the matter which I told to him when he came home, and I will
copy the important parts of it.

"Comes now, June 22, 1917. 11 A.M. with Mrs. Curran and her
mother on the way to market three blocks away.

"All at once, without any preliminary warning, as in a single
flash, she was overwhelmed with the entire framework of the story
which she felt had been on the way. In the twinkling of an eye,
like the bursting of an inner veil or the sudden drawing of a
great curtain, she found herself immediately in possession of
practically the entire mechanism of a wonderful story, the plot,
the characters, that subtle spirit essence of the central idea,
the purpose, and with it came a great exaltation. Even the name of
the story came, which was The Madrigal.

"It took Mrs. Curran two hours to tell me what she had received
in a flash, and what follows of the tale is from, memory:

"The babe within the charity place was the central figure. The
tale is of the first years of this babe's life. She is a child
born out of wedlock within this squalid place, while her mother
is, a little while later, seen within the light of, the Thames
hookman as he pulls her out of the river, dead. This mother was a
woman of the fields, reared among lower classes, but with flights
of soul which did not fit her station. She was scoffed at and
discouraged by her associates until at last, out of her meeting
with the future father of her child, grew a bitterness and
rebellion which ended in her yielding to his evil influences.

"The father was a young poet and writer of great promise and
high family. His mother was a doting parent who blinds herself to
his evil acts, attributing them to temperament. His sister is
equally ambitious for him, but is not so tolerant of his
escapades.

"Just how the child was born and left, does not appear. The
place is reached by a long narrow stairway showing grease and
grime from countless evil hands that have traversed it. The child
has red hair and green eyes with peculiar lines within them. The
old women of the place jokingly refer to the child as the
'Madrigal' and one old hag with a meaningful reference to the poet
sneered: 'He sung!' Grim joke! Not a symphony she, merely a simple
lay dashed off in an idle moment.

"The name stuck, and one day the child knew that a Madrigal was
a beautiful song. So, although not beautiful, she steadfastly
expected to be, and sang through the days up and down the grimy
Thames shores among the boatmen and fishers, who stopped to listen
and say: 'The Madrigal is singing.'

"And he, the father, never did his great thing, and the years
left him still empty, until at last through a great tragedy he
found his little girl and found her singing, and that she was
called the Madrigal. Looking back upon his wasted life he suddenly
realizes that in a moment of little thought in his evil hours, and
with no good intent, he had created the greatest thing of his
life, a beautiful, simple steady soul whose voice was the light in
the dark places along the dingy river, even in hunger and pain,
singing, singing, a madrigal, his madrigal!"

I will not attempt to give more than this bare outline what
came to me in this flash, but the incident still remains upon me
as the most startling and wonderful thing that Patience Worth has
brought me.

One very odd and interesting phase of the phenomena, is the
fact that during the time of transcribing the matter and watching
the tiny panorama unfold before me, I have often seen myself,
small as one of the characters, standing as an onlooker, or
walking among the people in the play. When I became curious to
ascertain, for instance, what sort of fruit a market man was
selling, or the smell of some flower, or the feel of some texture
which was foreign to my experience, this tiny figure of myself
would boldly take part in the play, quite naturally, perhaps,
walking to the bin-side of a market man and taking up the fruit
and tasting it, or smelling the flower within a garden, or feeling
the cloth, or in any natural way attending to the problem in hand.
And the experience was immediately my property, as though it had
been an actual experience: for it was as real to me as any
personal experience, becoming physically mine, recorded by my
sight, taste and smell as other experiences. Thus I have become
familiar with many flowers of strange places which I never saw,
but know when I see them again in the pictures. I have shuddered
at obnoxious odors, or have been quite exalted by the beauty of
some object, or filled with joy at beholding some flower which I
had never seen before. It is like traveling in new and unknown
regions, and I am filled with an impulse to let myself go, that I
may follow out the intricate pattern of the story, and gain new
knowledge. I find that I possess an uncanny familiarity with
things I have never known--with the kind of jugs and lamps used in
far countries in the long ago, and the various methods of cooking,
or certain odd and strange customs or dress or jewelry. I know
many manners and, customs of early England, or old Jerusalem, and
of Spain and France.

Another persistent phase of the phenomena is that ever since
the coming of Patience, she has been giving evidence of knowing
the inner life of those who come to meet her. So many scores and
hundreds of these occurrences have, transpired that it no longer
causes any wonder to the' people of her household. We write twice
a week, and every time we write, if there are newcomers, Patience
shows that she knows them and what they are doing, what their
sorrows are, if any, what are their dispositions; in fact she has
shown that in a pinch there is nothing about them which is kept
from her if she desires to know it.

This has brought us to believe that she actually has another
sense, vouchsafed only in small measure to the rest of us, which
gives her a clear view of others, so that she may refer, as she
often has, to things in their lives that no one else knows,
certainly not I, and she often tells people things about
themselves in such a way that I cannot understand what is meant,
yet the person interested does, and many a time I have had come
back to me months afterward things that Patience has told people
thus in secret. This happened scores of times in New York on my
recent visit.

One most peculiar thing about this work is that while I am
writing there seems to be no definite place where my consciousness
ceases, and that of Patience comes in. Very early I began to
notice that even while I was carefully spelling a poem, I was
keenly conscious, even with an added keenness, of everything about
me and of anything regarding my person at the same time. I could
feel my nose itch and scratch it, note an air of criticism on the
face of one of the company, and the worshipful expression of
another, think what I was going to have for midnight lunch after
they had gone, and write right along on the poem, Understanding it
as it came, and wondering at its beauty and strength, calling the
letters, then the words, pausing to let Mr. Curran catch up with
the writing. There are only two things which seem to jar Patience
off temporarily -- a sharp noise, as an impact, or a conversation
started by one of the company to which I would have to listen.

There are one or two classes of things which Patience is put to
it to give me. One is proper names, especially names of persons. I
had this trouble early in the writings, and now whenever I think
she is about to give me a proper name, I begin to try to help her
get it, which is the very thing which prevents her from giving it
to me. My own thoughts intervene. I remember once in writing
The Sorry Tale we stuck on a woman's name, Legia. After a
long time Patience said:

"Thou hast an eye, thou hast an arm, thou hast a Legia!"

Thus I was circumvented and the name arrived. Another time she
tried to give the word sanctuary. Now had had this word before,
but this time it was used in a new sense, and I stuck. Finally she
showed me a picture: a wide field brown with autumn withering.
Suddenly across it sped a red fox running for his life, followed
by a hallooing crowd of horsemen and dogs. The fox made for a
house at the edge of the field and ran under the porch., A man
appeared, ran toward the horsemen, and raising, his hand cried:
"Sanctuary!" It was my word.

We have done very little experimenting with the machinery with
which Patience gives me her words. The first thing an investigator
wants to do is to blindfold me, turn the board over, or make
"conditions" other than those under which I have so long written.
To me this is amusing as I do that they might as well try to get
heavenly temperature by feeling a kite string. Once a certain
psychologist asked that I try to write with the board upside down.
I did, and nothing came. Then I suggested that if he would let the
board stay right side up until I began a poem, it might be I could
then write with it inverted. This was done, and so it proved. But
when the board was inverted, I still was able to see a board with
letters just as it was before, so I could go right on. I am
satisfied that Patience showed me the board : for it was just as
real as anything she shows me, but had the advantage of looking as
if it were under glass. When we again resumed the proper position,
Patience asked the learned doctor if he didn't want to try it with
the pointer upside down!

It would seem that the memory of Patience Worth is perfect. We
have asked her to recall certain things, such as the lines of a
poem she had written months before for a scientist by request, but
which he and all of us had forgotten so completely that we knew
not even what it was about. She gave the first four lines just to
show she could.

Once a record was lost. It was the record which came when
The Sorry Tale was first begun. Twenty months afterwards,
when Mr. Yost prepared to write his preface to the book, we were
still unable to locate the record, and in despair asked Patience
if she could recall it, and she proceeded to give it to us
verbatim. Each time the coming was witnessed by the same five
people who could not give it themselves, but recognized it when it
was repeated Patience. It was only about 150 words.

Often there comes to me the realization that Patience not only
knows what is going on now, but knows the literature of all times
and places. When she began her beautiful French story that she is
now working on, she mentioned in its pages Villon the great poet
of whom we then knew nothing. She went farther and gave a hint of
the character of his work. But at the same time came a reference
to another poet of the same land, one Basselin, and told of the
nature of his writings. I cannot even admit the possibility that I
had ever heard the name, though of course he must have slipped
into my subconsciousness whole while I was not looking! Sly
dog!

Now comes a rather important reference to sacred history. Some
weeks ago, Archbishop Glennon of this diocese, following a general
policy of the Catholic church, preached a sermon upon the return
of spirits, in which he said that good spirits did not return,
that they were "in the keeping of God," and that if spirits did
return, they were emissaries of the Evil One, tempting with soft
words and a robe of piety, the souls of men to their damnation.
This not verbatim, but in effect. This was on Sunday; and the
papers the next morning contained this synopsis. That evening we
wrote with Patience, and the matter was mentioned. At once
Patience had this to say:

"I say me, who became apparent before the Maid? Who became a
vision before Bernadette? No less than the Mother; yet they have
lifted up their voices saying the dead are in His keeping."

This last about the dead gave us the cue to what she referred,
though we had no idea of what she meant by the rest. Looking up
the matter the next day we found that Bernadette Soubirous was the
Maid of Lourdes, the peasant girl before whom appeared the Mother
Mary according to the annals of Church history. So notwithstanding
the Archbishop, they must come back. It might interest the reader
to know the final remark Patience made as to this:

"No man's word," she said, "may be a bolt to heaven's gateway.
I shall sing not one lay which shall not contain God. Let any man
do this, and he need not fear temptation nor the phantom Satan. If
Satan were before thee he would be a mollusk, a boneless thing,
the tongue of man!"

One night we were at a neighboring theatre. During an act in
which there were a number of Scotch costumes giving instrumental
selections, I began to see some of the pictures Patience shows me.
I saw a field of grain and a man standing with one spear in his
hand. There was something in the music which seemed to aid in the
bringing the scene.

I roused and told this to Mr. Curran who was me. We realized at
once that the green border of scene with the yellow plaids of the
girls formed a similarity to the green and gold board which I use,
one specially made to save my eyes, with a green background and
gilt letters. When opportunity came, we asked Patience, and she
said that with this was also the calling of a pipe in the music
which was being played, which was the same sound as the pipe of
Panda in The Sorry Tale when he played at night in the lone
hills of Bethlehem; "and the notes sobbed and dripped of
tears."

Patience's literary stunts -- things she does which no mortal
man may do, according to our wise writers, form a large share of
the wonderful evidences of superusual power. Here are a few:

Wrote the novel Telka, 70,000 words in blank verse,
actual writing time 35 hours. Characters well rounded, plot true
and novel, language a high order of poetry, about 80 per cent
dialogue. Written in a manufactured English formed of a
combination of all English dialects; 98 per cent words of one and
two syllables; 95 per cent pure Anglo-Saxon; no word in it that
has come into the Ianguage since the sixteenth century; a tapestry
closely woven, and revealing a beautiful purpose.

Patience is writing on four novels at once, part of each at a
time. She has written a line of one in its dialect, then a line of
another in a different dialect, then back to the first for a line,
switching from one to the other at top speed and without a break;
at times she has assembled two persons in each story, engaged them
in conversation, and made the characters of one seem to reply and
even argue with the characters in the other. When the stories are
stript apart, it is found that they read right along in the proper
continuity of text.

She has also written a line of a poem, a line of story, and
then alternated them for some time to the completion the poem.
When stript, it is invariably found that each is whole and
unhurt.

Amongst the poems and stories, even between the lines, she stop
stops to converse or make an epigram or give a discourse, parable
or prayer, as the mood or the occasion seems to warrant. She has
done about every kind of literary form except those that require
rhyme. These she seems to dislike, but we have concluded that it
is for the reason that whenever she begins to rhyme, and I notice
it, I interpose my own thoughts, and in spite of myself try to
help her with the rhymes, confusing the whole operation, There
are, however, about ten rhymed poems in the entire 2,200 she has
given.

Patience appals people in the amount of her labors. Her record
for one evening's poems is twenty-two; and to show that they are
not mere jumbled words, I will state that Mr. Braithwaite put five
out of the twenty-two in his Anthology for 1917, as among the best
poems of, the year. One million, six hundred thousand words in
five years, all literature, is an output that cannot be, equaled
in the annals of history.

Patience puts only one limit to the things she will do by
request, and that is that they must have some bearing upon
religion, which to her includes all morals and the rules of
brotherhood. She bars creeds. So when the State Capitol Commission
of Missouri, intent on putting inscriptions by Missouri authors on
certain tablets in new state house, asked Patience to furnish one,
she gave it willingly.

The requirements for this inscription were that it contain 120
letters only, the spaces and punctuation marks to be counted as
letters. Patience gave this as fast as it could be written in
longhand:

'Tis the grain of God that be within

thy hands. Cast nay grain awhither.

Even the chaff is His, and the dust

thy brother's.

Count the letters, spaces and punctuation. They foot up 120 in
all.

I cannot close this article without an appeal for help. I
cannot get it from Patience: for she is silent on the subject.
When she was dictating her last completed book, The Pot Upon
the Wheel, she said that "love rode upon the back of a bird,
and carried a rod of sweet cane and a brace of arrows." Somewhere,
I firmly believe, there is a legend of this sort, or somewhere
there is an account of it, but where, we never have been able to
find. Does any reader of the Unpartizan know where such reference
may be found? The plot of the story is laid within the wall of a
desert town of Arabia, no telling how many years ago, though it
might be more modern than we think. This may be a help to the
answering.

Lately I have been doing some writing on my own account, --
without the impulse from Patience Worth -- and so far have been
very successful. In doing this material, I use a typewriter, and
by persistent practice have become quite adept, having reached the
point now where I can use the keys unconsciously. Once the trick
of using the keys without the conscious effort to find each and
every one was learned, -- Presto! there is a perfectly good means
of communication, unhampered with conscious effort.
Patience seemed to realize it, and delivered a poem to me through
the typewriter instead of the Ouija board. As I was writing a
letter to a friend, I wrote a line of poetry before I realized
that I had done it, then it crowded along and infringed itself
into the text of my letter! . . . The keyboard offered the letters
in the same way that the Ouija did, and the removal of conscious
effort left me free for her dictation. My own writing of short
stories without the aid of Patience has been most interesting --to
watch the functioning of my own mind and feel the difference
between the conscious effort of the ordinary manner of writing, as
against the unconscious manner in which the Patience Worth
material comes to me.

My own writing fatigues me, while the other (Patience Worth's)
exhilarates me. That's a queer mess of a statement, but quite
true.

I am rapidly discarding the Ouija board. This has been coming
on for a long time. For months I have been almost unconsciously
dropping the spelling of the words until I have been able lately
to simply recite the poems instead; though if I become conscious
of the change, I have to go back to the spelling. Last night I
wrote a poem on my typewriter for Patience. Every other condition
was the same, her presence, the pictures of the symbols, the
pressure on my head, and everything except that I was at the
typewriter, and since I can now write on the machine without
guiding my fingers, the lines came right along. I expect
eventually to discard the board altogether. I hate to do this, for
think of the check there will be upon the sale of Ouija
boards!